Prior to the pandemic, Fairfax County relied on volunteers to deliver meals and spend time with seniors and homebound people multiple times per week through its Meals on Wheels program. During the pandemic, the county shifted to engaging a contractor to drop meals on a more limited once per week schedule. The county plans to keep using a contractor, according to a plan recently submitted to the Virginia Department of Aging and Rehabilitative Services.

Meals On Wheels provides homebound elderly people not only with food, but also regular social contact. The once-a-week frequency outlined in the Fairfax plan is counter to the vision of the national home nutrition program laid out in the federal Older Americans Act of 1965, which allows states to exempt remote rural areas from five-day-per-week meal delivery but offers no other explicit exceptions.

The Fairfax plan specifies the county vendor “prepares and delivers the food to each recipient as well as provides a social well-check and notifies case managers of any follow-up for any unmet needs.”

Fairfax ended Meals On Wheels volunteer shifts at the beginning of the pandemic, out of concern for the health of meal recipients as well as the volunteers themselves. It has declined to bring them back.

People in the Fairfax program — there are about 600 participants, according to the county — get 11 meals per week, six frozen and five cold. In fiscal year 2023, the county served 309,031 meals, for a total cost of about $2 million, which is mostly funded by federal money that states disburse to local home nutrition programs.

Prior to the pandemic, volunteers delivered meals to the bulk of recipients three times per week, with a few exceptions, according to county staff. One zip code had daily deliveries, and a handful of people received frozen meals once per week.

The county’s contractor, Jeffrey’s Catering, started delivering meals to home nutrition clients during the pandemic, replacing the volunteers. The company has a contract with the county which was renewed at the beginning of August and runs until June 2024.

Dave Roycraft was a volunteer leader with the Fairfax program before the pandemic, driving a route himself, coordinating the meal drop-offs for another ten routes and managing 80 volunteers total. (He now volunteers for the Prince William County program, which still uses volunteers.) He worries about the isolation of the older people he served for years who haven’t had volunteers dropping by several times a week and spending time with them.

“I’ve had so many people say to me, ‘You know, you volunteers are so wonderful. I don’t know what I’d do without you,” he says.

Roycraft became a volunteer for the service in 2011, after hearing from his widowed mother about what a big difference regular visits from Meals On Wheels volunteers had made in her life.

“I said, how wonderful it was that these total, complete strangers who don’t know my mom from anybody are reaching out,” he recalls. “I said, ‘I want to do that myself.’”

Roycraft says the magic of Meals On Wheels is that the basic delivery of food becomes a vehicle for a social interaction for isolated people who might look askance at more direct forms of social support.

“And if it were not for the fact that we’re delivering the food that they ask for to be delivered to them, they would never open the door to a strange volunteer who says, ‘Hi, can I talk to you for a while?’ That would never happen,” Roycraft says. “But because I’m delivering the food that they’ve asked for, now all of a sudden there’s a connection there and we build a relationship.”

There’s some research to suggest that Roycraft’s anecdotal experience is borne out more generally. One federal study found that people receiving meal delivery “had lower adjusted loneliness scores” than peers who didn’t, and people who got meal deliveries daily “were more likely to self-report that home-delivered meals improved their loneliness than the group receiving once-weekly delivered meals.” A similar study from Brown University researchers who worked with Meals On Wheels America, the national umbrella organization, reached similar conclusions about the impact of daily deliveries compared to frozen weekly deliveries. Researchers also found that there were benefits to physical health, too, including a lower rate of falls.

Evidence also suggests the need for social connection among elderly people has been particularly great in the last few years. A University of Chicago report conducted in partnership with Meals On Wheels America found the pandemic “dramatically increased” older adults’ loneliness.

Now, Roycraft is hoping the state will reject the county’s aging plan on the grounds that once-weekly deliveries are not a best practice, and run counter to the language of the Older Americans Act.

“There is no valid reason whatsoever for the state to approve this,” he says.

Virginia’s Department of Aging and Rehabilitative Services declined to offer an opinion on whether or not five-day-per-week meal deliveries were a recognized best practice. A spokesperson deferred questions back to Fairfax County.

A Virginia DARS aging services standards document from 2019 says the social connections related to food deliveries are “a vital aspect” of the program, and particularly cautions localities from running programs that only offer deliveries once or twice per month.

Asked about the decision to move to weekly deliveries instead of more frequent ones, Fairfax County said it had conducted a survey of its home-delivered nutrition clients, who said they were happy with the service as it was.

“Our Meals on Wheels program is a sustainable model that continues to be a successful and essential service for people who require home delivered meals. In fact, 90% of participants report they are satisfied with the current service model provided by the vendor,” said Trina Mayhan-Webb, director of Older Adult Services, Fairfax County Department of Family Services, in a statement sent in response to DCist/WAMU’s questions about the program.

The county notes that staff did a pilot to experiment with a volunteer-vendor hybrid model in September 2022, and as part of that work surveyed about 100 Meals On Wheels recipients. It found overwhelming satisfaction with one delivery per week, with some participants saying it allowed them flexibility in going to medical appointments or social activities. More than two-thirds said they were socially engaged in other ways, including in faith communities, home-based care services, visits and calls with family and neighbors, and senior center activities.

Roycraft questions the county’s findings, particularly the satisfaction participants expressed with getting meals once a week. He sees the results as more of a reflection of vulnerable participants’ desire to not impose on others or demand too much of the system that is a lifeline for them.

“They just don’t want to put anybody out, and they’ll just go along with whatever they have, and they just don’t rock the boat,” he says. “That’s so typical of elderly people across the board.”

Fairfax County says using a contractor instead of a volunteer network has saved time and money.

“The vendor model has also created a more efficient process by reducing staff time coordinating and delivering a meal when a volunteer is unavailable to make a delivery,” a spokesperson said in an emailed statement. “Cost savings have also been realized by eliminating the mileage reimbursement for volunteers.”

The county plan notes that the vendor program costs Fairfax $195,000. The costs of the meals themselves are borne by federal funding distributed by the state.

The county says it also has plenty of other volunteer opportunities, including visiting elderly people to socialize with them.

But Roycraft has spent the past two years — since the county told volunteers in June 2021 that they would not be brought back —trying to return to driving his Meals On Wheels routes. He’s sent letters to his state legislators and had meetings with county supervisors. He’s emailed, called, and met with county staff and state staff. He obtained the latest Fairfax On Aging area plan by a public information request.

“I mean, ‘crusade’ may be an appropriate term,” he says. “It’s something that I really feel is such a critically important service,” a wonderful thing for clients and volunteers alike.

Most other localities in Northern Virginia currently use volunteers to deliver meals, some at much higher frequencies than Fairfax. Alexandria’s home-delivered nutrition program offers daily deliveries. Loudoun volunteers deliver meals every weekday.

Arlington County and Prince William County use volunteers, but only deliver meals once a week.

Roycraft acknowledges that running a volunteer program is not without challenges, but he doesn’t see that as a justification for not trying to make it work.

“Every time you have 400 or more volunteers, there are going to be problems,” he says. “And the thousands of programs all across the country, including all the jurisdictions surrounding Fairfax, have figured out how to do that, and they do it very successfully.”

This story has been updated with comment from the Virginia Department of Aging and Rehabilitative Services.